What nonsense to talk of being a prisoner! Her eyes were free to roam, and her heart was light as a bird’s homing across the shining world toward the shining future. She must remember always in the happiness that was coming, how she first had seen it at its vividest from a throne of rocks, sitting between the tundra and the sea. Oh, but she was glad she had come! If it was Cheviot’s mission to see how work went on at the gold camp, hers no less to see with her own eyes—to get by heart and keep for ever—the aspect of the world up here where you touch the skirts of the uttermost North. Happy, happy chance that vouchsafed the vision on one of those unmatched days of the short arctic summer that she’d heard about so long ago—a day that made you feel never before have you seen the sunshine showering such a glory on the world, never known such color on the sea, never felt the sweet wind bringing influence so magical. You unfurl the banner of your spirit, and you carry the splendid hour like a flag, looking abroad and saying: “This is what it is, then, to be alive. And I—I am still among the living!” In that same hour, a few yards from where Hildegarde sat waiting, a man was saying farewell to sun and sea and all the shining ways of all the world; and this man, dying in the peat hut at the tundra’s edge, was that one of all who heap up riches having most to leave behind. There was nothing about the solitary hovel that specially arrested the girl’s attention. She had seen several such on the way, during the delay at Grantley Harbor—rude makeshift shelters, deserted in favor of the booming camp at Nome. But Reddy found the sod hut somehow interesting, even suspicious. He had gone away to snuff at the threshold. He tore back to Hildegarde to report, then off again. Now he had set his sharp nose against the door, and now he howled softly. In the momentary lull of surf drawn seaward, to Hildegarde’s surprise, a responsive whine came weakly forth from the hut. Whereat Red’s excitement was so great that the girl forgot her ankle and stood up to quiet him. Why, the ankle hardly hurt at all! She might have gone—could she, even now, catch up with Louis? She picked her way across the rocks with scarce a twinge of pain, and she climbed upon the thick moss carpet of the tundra. Of course she could have gone! But Louis was out of sight. To say sooth, she was in a mood too happy to be cast down. For, as she had just been feeling, it was one of those hours when all life seems to be waiting for one to come and claim it, when a girl feels she has just this little time for pausing at the gate, to give the glad eyes full possession before she enters in. She takes the sunshine on her face, and all her being melts to gold, and has its little share in making the wide earth shine. Even her secret dreams are dissolved in the universal sea. Instead of hoping, fearing, her heart floats like an idle boat in that shifting iridescence. In the air,